Opinion Hundred years of International Labour Day in India: Why the eight-hour work day remains relevant

The unfolding momentum of the labour movement and its increasingly articulate critique of capitalism paved the way for many iconic labour agitations, like the Chicago Haymarket workers’ rally (1886), which in turn had a huge signalling effect. In the process, there emerged a steady realisation of the need to establish a common day for the assertion of non-negotiable labour rights, and for commemorating important labour struggles. By 1890, the Second International adopted the resolution for a worldwide struggle on the issue of a universal eight-hour work day. By the early 1900s, the May Day tradition was fairly entrenched with workers’ political organisations and trade unions stopping work wherever possible, and using the occasion to energetically demonstrate for universal working-class demands.

These crucial landmarks in the global resistance of labour marked a strong assertion and defence of lesser work hours, which has not only challenged the internal logic of the capitalist economy to overwork a few, but also exposed the resultant problem of rampant unemployment and deterioration of workers’ health. Thereby, an intrinsic part of the spirit of May Day has been the assertion that overwork and unemployment are two sides of the same coin. The decreasing work hours of employed workers is seen as generating the scope for gainful employment of those who are unemployed. In other words, labour’s evolving critique of estranged labour came to vigorously argue against the encroachment on a large part of the day by extensive work hours, which denied many regular employment, and at the same time deprived employed workers of hours which they could otherwise utilise for politics, spending time with friends and family, leisure, and basically to enjoy life as human beings.

Clearly, by the early 20th century an entire discourse had crystallised which drew attention to an essential fact; namely, that the wealth of the economy is a creation of labour. Indeed, everything in the modern world – from a sewing needle to huge aircraft carriers and skyscrapers are products of human labour. And yet, the entitlements of labour in the economy are negligible. For all long hours of work and physical exertion, what labour gets in return is simply poverty, precarity and powerlessness.

In the early 20th century in India, the exploited, precarious condition of labour was bolstered by colonial rule. The colonial state refrained from regulation of work relations between employers and employees, arguing that these constituted a private matter of contract. However, the assemblage of large numbers of workers at crucial points of the capitalist value creation chain, and labour’s visible collective mobilisation against exploitative work arrangements in new workplaces, such as mines, plantations, dockyards, and factories, gradually propelled the recognition of employer-employee relations not as private relations, but as constituting the public domain of social relations.

At the time when Singaravelu launched the tradition of May Day in India, the horrors of the First World War and the appended radicalization of labour had facilitated worker-led revolutions in Europe, as well as numerous militant strike waves in India’s industrial centres. Hence, in order to placate (in particular) organised labour and labour militancy, governments and post-War international institutions of diplomacy sought to install a uniform standard for labour rights. In this way, the first international treaty to mention the eight-hour workday was the Treaty of Versailles, which in the annexe of its thirteenth part established the International Labour Office, now the International Labour Organization (ILO). Given the spectre of revolution that loomed large, it was no coincidence that the eight-hour workday was the first topic discussed by the ILO, culminating in the Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, 1919.

Since then, an expansive corpus of labour laws evolved in India. However, only a small number of employer-employee work relations – associated mostly with the formal sector – have been governed by the country’s labour laws, and thus, subject to state regulation. Further, in the present conjuncture, we have seen a rapid decline in state regulation of labour-capital relations even in the formal sector. The deregulation of a large number of work relations is most evident in the rapid privatization of the public sector; the watering down of the provisions of labour inspection; the growing paradigm of self-certification by employers of their compliance with labour laws; the exemptions provided to smaller industrial and commercial establishments from furnishing proof of their compliance with statutory labour laws; and the tweaking of many statutory labour laws on occupational safety standards, work hours, minimum wage, compensation, industrial disputes, etc. by successive governments, both at the state and central level.

Consequently, the private power of employers to unilaterally fix wages, extract overtime, determine compensation, etc. has substantially increased; returning labour to the colonial precarity of the early twentieth century. We are witness to the burgeoning of an under-consuming majority, high unemployment rates, and a huge workforce of underpaid, overworked, and dehumanized workers – who are often tied down to firms that fail to enhance the size of their operations in order to avail exemptions from crucial labour laws. In dismal times such as these, the tradition of May Day proves even more relevant and potent, especially if we seek to go beyond the smokescreen of India’s supposed ‘growth’ story perpetuated by the ruling dispensation.

The writer, a labour historian, is an assistant professor at Jesus and Mary College, Delhi University